At the end of last year, there were many events and celebrations in my neighbourhood, announcing the arrival of Christmas and the New Year. We decided to visit the Italian town of Grado, located in eastern Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, not far from the Slovenian-Italian border. The decision to visit Grado was not a difficult one, because on that day there was also a special event that we had never seen live before, a drone show.
The drone show was scheduled for 18:30, but we had set off a few hours before, as we had the intention of seeing the town of Grado itself in festive colours first. We were lucky and parked the car on the main street that runs through the town. Here, we immediately noticed the information boards pointing visitors in the direction of the event.
The sun was just setting when we arrived, so we had just managed to catch the beautiful colours it had created on the horizon.
We then walked along the seaside, where several stalls were set up with various products offered by street vendors. To be honest, the offer was rather bland and unattractive, and there was not too much crowd or interest. The reason, in my opinion, was that since Grado has many small shops of various kinds, of course all the vendors were at work in them, where they had their hands full during this festive season. It is not reasonable to rent and pay for stalls if you have a shop a few hundred metres away from them.
The opposite situation was in the streets of the city centre, where the festive atmosphere and people's excitement for the upcoming holidays was in the air. The announced Drone Show event certainly contributed to the full streets, as it would also be massively advertised on social networks. A real marketing campaign if you ask me.
The city's sandy beach was a feast for the eyes. From afar, the not-so-tall, but still distinctive Easter tree was visible. How could it not be visible when it was towering over the sand, where there is no other greenery around 😊 There was also a bar in the area, which visitors looked forward to, as it had a wide range of tasty treats on offer.
When it was time for the main event we moved towards the location where the event was taking place. The drone show took place by the beach, where a walking path runs along the sea. In my opinion, this was an unfortunate choice of location. The walkway is bordered by a fence on one side and buildings on the other, so the venue place was very narrow. And with successful media publicity, it was crowded with visitors. It was really suffocating. It would have been better to choose the beach as the location for the drone show, because there is plenty of space. I understand that drone operators need space to prepare everything, but drones can fly in from anywhere, can't they?
As we were informed during the event, the drone show was performed with 80 drones. It sounds like a lot, but when I looked at videos of similar events around the world later at home, I saw that similar events are performed with more than a thousand drones 🤔
The duration of the event was fifteen minutes. With pleasant music and the announcer's words, the drones showed the figures of how the city of Grado has evolved throughout its history, from a small seaside village to the modern tourism destination that it has become today. It is truly impressive to see how these small flying drones can make such a presentation with such precision in the sky.
The end of the performance was also very interesting, when the drones returned to their starting position, lined up and landed, ten in a row, exactly from where they took off.
After the drone show, my family and I were unanimous in expecting a little more from this performance, given all the media hype that had been going on around it. But for the first time, we told ourselves that it was great too, and with a bit of a bitter taste in our mouths, we headed to a nearby bar for a hot chocolate and an aperol spritz 😊
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